He looked up; she was examining her empty teacup with fixed interest.
"Ask what sort of thing?" he inquired, walking over to the table and resting his glass on it.
"Oh, I don't know what I meant. Nothing. What is that in your glass? Let me taste it. … Ugh! It's Scotch!"
She set back the glass with a shudder. After a few moments she picked it up again and tasted it disdainfully.
"Do you like this?" she demanded with youthful contempt.
"Pretty well," he admitted.
"It tastes something like brandied peaches, doesn't it?"
"I never noticed that it did."
And as he remained smilingly aloof and silent, at intervals, tentatively, uncertain whether or not she exactly cared for it, she tasted the iced contents of the tall, frosty glass and watched him where he sat loosely at ease flicking at sun-moats with the loop of his riding-crop.
"I'd like to see a typical studio," she said reflectively.
"I've asked you to mine often enough."
"Yes, to tea with other people. I don't mean that way. I'd like to see it when it's not all dusted and in order for feminine inspection. I'd like to see a man's studio when it's in shape for work—with the gr-r-reat painter in a fine frenzy painting, and the model posing madly——"
"Come on, then! If Kathleen lets you, and you can stand it, come down and knock some day unexpectedly."
"O Duane! I couldn't, could I?"
"Not with propriety. But come ahead."
"Naturally, impropriety appeals to you."
"Naturally. To you, too, doesn't it?"
"No. But wouldn't it astonish you if you heard a low, timid knocking some day when you and your Bohemian friends were carousing and having a riotous time there——"
"Yes, it would, but I'm afraid that low, timid knocking couldn't be heard in the infernal uproar of our usual revelry."
"Then I'd knock louder and louder, and perhaps kick once or twice if you didn't come to the door and let me in."
He laughed. After a moment she laughed, too; her dark eyes were very friendly now. Watching the amusement in his face, she continued to sip from his tall, frosted glass, quite unconscious of any distaste for it. On the contrary, she experienced a slight exhilaration which was gradually becoming delightful to her.
"Scotch-and-soda is rather nice, after all," she observed. "I had no idea—What is the matter with you, Duane?"
"You haven't swallowed all that, have you?"
"Yes, is it much?"
He stared, then with a shrug: "You'd better cut out that sort of thing."
"What?" she asked, surprised.
"What you're doing."
"Tasting your Scotch? Pooh!" she said, "it isn't strong. Do you think I'm a baby?"
"Go ahead," he said, "it's your funeral."
Legs crossed, chin resting on the butt of his riding-crop, he lay back in his chair watching her.
Women of her particular type had always fascinated him; Fifth Avenue is thronged with them in sunny winter mornings—tall, slender, faultlessly gowned girls, free-limbed, narrow of wrist and foot; cleanly built, engaging, fearless-eyed; and Geraldine was one of a type characteristic of that city and of the sunny Avenue where there pass more beautiful women on a December morning than one can see abroad in half a dozen years' residence.
How on earth this hemisphere has managed to evolve them out of its original material nobody can explain. And young Mallett, recently from the older hemisphere, was still in a happy trance of surprise at the discovery.
Lounging there, watching her where she sat warmly illumined by the golden light of the window-shade, he said lazily:
"Do you know that Fifth Avenue is always thronged with you, Geraldine? I've nearly twisted my head off trying not to miss the assorted visions of you which float past afoot or driving. Some day one of them will unbalance me. I'll leap into her victoria, ask her if she'd mind the temporary inconvenience of being adored by a stranger; and if she's a good sport she'll take a chance. Don't you think so?"
"It's more than I'd take with you," said the girl.
"You've said that several times."
He laughed, then looked up at her half humorously, half curiously.
"You would be taking no chances, Geraldine."
"I'd be taking chances of finding you holding some other girl's hands within twenty-four hours. And you know it."
"Hasn't anybody ever held yours?"
Displeasure tinted her cheeks a deeper red, but she merely shrugged her shoulders.
It was true that in the one evanescent and secret affair of her first winter she had not escaped the calf-like transports of Bunbury Gray. She had felt, if she had not returned them, the furtively significant pressure of men's hands in the gaiety and whirl of things; ardent and chuckle-headed youth had declared itself in conservatories and in corners; one impetuous mauling from a smitten Harvard boy of eighteen had left her furiously vexed with herself for her passive attitude while the tempest passed. True, she had vigorously reproved him later. She had, alas, occasion, during her first season, to reprove several demonstrative young men for their unconventionally athletic manner of declaring their suits. She had been far more severe with the humble, unattractive, and immobile, however, than with the audacious and ornamental who had attempted to take her by storm. A sudden if awkward kiss followed by the fiery declaration of the hot-headed disturbed her less than the persistent stare of an enamoured pair of eyes. As a child the description of an assault on a citadel always interested her, but she had neither sympathy nor interest in a siege.
Now, musing there in the sunlight on the events of her first winter, she became aware that she had been more or less instructed in the ways of men; and, remembering, she lifted her disturbed eyes to inspect this specimen of a sex which often perplexed but always interested her.
"What are you smiling about, Duane?" she asked defiantly.
"Your arraignment of me when half the men in town have been trying to marry you all winter. You've made a reputation for yourself, too, Geraldine."
"As what?" she asked angrily.
"A head-twister."
"Do you mean a flirt?"
"Oh, Lord! Only the French use that term now. But that's the idea, Geraldine. You are a born one. I fell for the first smile you let loose on me."
"You seem to have been a sort of general Humpty Dumpty for falls all your life, Duane," she said with dangerous sweetness.
"Like that immortal, I've had only one which permanently shattered me."
"Which was that, if you please?"
"The fall you took out of me."
"In other words," she said disdainfully, "you are beginning to make love to me again."
"No. … I was in love with you."
"You were in love with yourself, young man. You are on such excellent terms with yourself that you sympathise too ardently with any attractive woman who takes the least and most innocent notice of you."
He said, very much amused: "I was perfectly serious over you, Geraldine."
"The selfish always take themselves seriously."
It was she, however, who now sat there bright-eyed and unsmiling, and he was still laughing, deftly balancing his crop on one finger, and glancing at her from time to time